The Most of Nora Ephron Page 3

  With hindsight, of course, I can see how brilliantly institutionalized the sexism was at Newsweek. For every man, an inferior woman. For every male writer, a female drone. For every flamboyant inventor of a meaningless-but-unknown detail, a young drudge who could be counted on to fill it in. For every executive who erred, an underling to pin it on. But it was way too early in the decade for me to notice that, and besides, I was starting to realize that I was probably never going to be promoted to writer at Newsweek. And by the way, if I ever had been, I have no reason to think I would have been good at it.

  The famous 114-day newspaper strike (which wasn’t a strike but a lockout) began in December 1962, and one of its side effects was that several journalists who were locked out by their newspapers came to Newsweek to be writers, temporarily. One of them was Charles Portis, a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune whom I went out with for a while, but that’s not the point (although it’s not entirely beside the point); the point is that Charlie, who was a wonderful writer with a spectacular and entirely eccentric style (he later became a novelist and the author of True Grit), was no good at all at writing the formulaic, voiceless, unbylined stories with strict line counts that Newsweek printed.

  By then I had become friends with Victor Navasky. He was the editor of a satirical magazine called Monocle, and it seemed that he knew everyone. He knew important people, and he knew people he made you think were important simply because he knew them. Monocle came out only sporadically, but it hosted a lot of parties, and I met people there who became friends for life, including Victor’s wife, Annie, Calvin Trillin, and John Gregory Dunne. Victor also introduced me to Jane Green, who was an editor at Condé Nast. She was an older woman, about twenty-five, very stylish and sophisticated, and she knew everyone too. She introduced me to my first omelette, my first Brie, and my first vitello tonnato. She used the word “painterly” and tried to explain it to me. She asked me what kind of Jew I was. I had never heard of the concept of what kind of Jew you were. Jane was a German Jew, which was not to say she was from Germany but that her grandparents had been. She was extremely pleased about it. I had no idea it mattered. (And by the way, it didn’t, really; those days were over.)

  I could go on endlessly about the things I learned from Jane. She told me all about de Kooning and took me to the Museum of Modern Art to see pop art and op art. She taught me the difference between Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. She’d gone out with a number of well-known journalists and writers, and long before I met them I knew, because of Jane, a number of intimate details about them. Eventually, I went to bed with one of them and that was the end of my friendship with her, but that’s getting ahead of things.

  One day after the newspaper strike was about a month old, Victor called to say he’d managed to raise $10,000 to put out parodies of the New York newspapers, and asked if I would write a parody of Leonard Lyons’s gossip column in the New York Post. I said yes, although I had no idea what to do. I’d met Lyons—he appeared nightly at Sardi’s, where my parents often had dinner when they were in New York—but I’d never really focused on his column. I called my friend Marcia, who’d recently babysat Leonard Lyons’s son’s dogs, and asked her what the deal was with Lyons. She explained to me that the Lyons column was a series of short anecdotes with no point whatsoever. I went upstairs to the morgue at Newsweek and read a few weeks’ worth of Lyons’s columns and wrote the parody. Parodies are very odd things. I’ve written only about a half dozen of them in my life [see here; here]; they come on you like the wind, and you write them almost possessed. It’s as close as a writer gets to acting—it’s almost as if you’re in character for a short time, and then it passes.

  The papers Victor produced—the New York Pest and the Dally News—made their way to the newsstands, but they didn’t sell. Newsstand dealers really didn’t understand parodies in those days—this was long before National Lampoon and the Onion—and most of them sent them back to the distributor. But everyone in the business read them. They were funny. The editors of the Post wanted to sue, but the publisher, Dorothy Schiff, said, “Don’t be ridiculous. If they can parody the Post they can write for it. Hire them.” So the editors called Victor and Victor called me and asked if I’d be interested in trying out for a job at the Post. Of course I was.

  I went down to the Post offices on West Street a few days later. It was a freezing day in February and I got lost trying to find the entrance to the building, which was actually on Washington Street. I took the elevator to the second floor and walked down the long dingy hall and into the city room. I couldn’t imagine I was in the right place. It was a large dusty room with dirty windows looking out at the Hudson, not that you could see anything through the windows. Sitting in a clump of desks in the winter dark was a group of three or four editors. They offered me a reporting tryout as soon as the lockout was over.

  There were seven newspapers in New York at that time, and the Post was the least of them, circulation-wise. It had always been a liberal paper, and it had had glory days under an editor named James Wechsler, but those days were over. Still, the paper had a solid base of devoted readers. Seven weeks into the lockout, Dorothy Schiff bolted the Publishers Association and reopened the paper, and I took a two-week leave of absence from Newsweek and began my tryout. I’d prepared by studying the Post, but more important, by being coached by Jane, who’d worked there briefly. She explained everything I needed to know about the paper. She told me that the Post was an afternoon newspaper and the stories in it were known as “overnights”; they were not to be confused with the news stories in the morning papers. They were feature stories; they had a point of view; they were the reason people bought an afternoon paper in addition to a morning paper. You never used a simple “Who What Where Why When and How” lead in an afternoon paper. She also told me that when I got an assignment, never to say, “I don’t understand” or “Where exactly is it?” or “How do I get in touch with them?” Go back to your desk, she said, and figure it out. Pull the clips from the morgue. Look in the telephone book. Look in the crisscross directory. Call your friends. Do anything but ask the editor what to do or how to get there.

  I arrived for my tryout expecting the city room to look different from the way it had on that dark winter day I’d first come there, but except for brighter lighting, it didn’t. It was a relic, really—a period set for a 1920s newsroom. The desks were old, the chairs were broken. Everyone smoked, but there were no ashtrays; the burning cigarettes rested on the edges of desks and left dark smudge marks. There were not enough desks to go around, so unless you’d been there for twenty years, you didn’t have your own desk, or even a drawer; finding a place to sit was sort of like musical chairs. The windows were never cleaned. The doors leading into the city room had insets of frosted glass, and they were so dusty that someone had written the word “Philthy” on them with a finger. I couldn’t have cared less. I had spent almost half my life wanting to be a newspaper reporter, and now I had a shot at it.

  I had four bylines my first week. I interviewed the actress Tippi Hedren. I went to the Coney Island aquarium to write about two hooded seals that were refusing to mate. I interviewed an Italian film director named Nanni Loy. I covered a murder on West Eighty-second Street. On Friday afternoon, I was offered a permanent job at the paper. One of the reporters took me out for a drink that night, to a bar nearby called the Front Page. That’s what it was called, the Front Page. Later that night, we took a taxi up Madison Avenue and we passed the Newsweek Building. I looked up at the eleventh floor, where the lights were ablaze, and I thought, Up there they are closing next week’s edition of Newsweek, and nobody really gives a damn. It was a stunning revelation.

  I loved the Post. Of course, it was a zoo. The editor was a sexual predator. The managing editor was a lunatic. Sometimes it seemed that half the staff was drunk. But I loved my job. In my first year there, I learned how to write, which I barely knew when I began. The editors and copy editors brought me along. They
actually nurtured me. They assigned me short pieces at first, then longer pieces, then five-part series. I learned by doing, and after a while, I had an instinctive sense of structure. There was a brilliant copy editor, Fred McMorrow, who would walk my story back to me and explain why he was making the changes he was making. Never begin a story with a quote, he said. Never use anything but “said.” Never put anything you really care about into the last paragraph because it will undoubtedly be cut for space. There was a great features editor, Joe Rabinovich, who kept my occasional stylistic excesses in line; he saved me from woeful idiocy when Tom Wolfe began writing for the Herald Tribune and I made a pathetic attempt to write exactly like him. The executive editor, Stan Opotowsky, came up with a series of offbeat feature assignments for me. I wrote about heat waves and cold snaps; I covered the Beatles and Bobby Kennedy and the Star of India robbery.

  The Post had a bare-bones staff, but more women worked there than worked at all the other New York papers combined. The greatest of the rewrite men at the Post was a woman named Helen Dudar. Hello, sweetheart, get me rewrite. In those days, the Post published six editions a day, starting at eleven in the morning and ending with the four-thirty stock market final. When news broke, reporters in the street would phone in the details from pay phones and rewrite men would write the stories. The city room was right next to the press room, and the noise—of reporters typing, pressmen linotyping, wire machines clacking, and presses rolling—was a journalistic fantasy.

  I worked at the Post for five years. Then I became a magazine writer. I believed in journalism. I believed in truth. I believed that when people claimed they’d been misquoted, they were just having trouble dealing with the sight of their words in cold, hard print. I believed that when political activists claimed that news organizations conspired against them, they had no idea that most journalistic enterprises were far too inept to harbor conspiracy. I believed that I was temperamentally suited to journalism because of my cynicism and emotional detachment; I sometimes allowed that these were character flaws, but I didn’t really believe it.

  I married a journalist, and that didn’t work. But then I married another, and it did.

  Now I know that there’s no such thing as the truth. That people are constantly misquoted. That news organizations are full of conspiracy (and that, in any case, ineptness is a kind of conspiracy). That emotional detachment and cynicism get you only so far.

  But for many years I was in love with journalism. I loved the city room. I loved the pack. I loved smoking and drinking scotch and playing dollar poker. I didn’t know much about anything, and I was in a profession where you didn’t have to. I loved the speed. I loved the deadlines. I loved that you wrapped the fish.

  You can’t make this stuff up, I used to say.

  I’d known since I was a child that I was going to live in New York eventually, and that everything in between would be just an intermission. I’d spent all those years imagining what New York was going to be like. I thought it was going to be the most exciting, magical, fraught-with-possibility place that you could ever live; a place where if you really wanted something you might be able to get it; a place where I’d be surrounded by people I was dying to know; a place where I might be able to become the only thing worth being, a journalist.

  And I’d turned out to be right.

  —November 2010

  How to Write a Newsmagazine Cover Story

  You Too Can Be a Writer

  YOU CAN LEARN, in your spare time, to write articles for publication, and if you master the art, you can be paid to do it on a full-time basis.

  Of course, there are all sorts of writers. There are reporters, for example. Reporters have to learn how to uncover FACTS. This is very difficult to learn in your spare time. There are also serious journalists. But serious journalists have TALENT. There is no way to learn to have talent. There are also fiction writers. But fiction writers need IMAGINATION. Either you have imagination or you don’t. You can’t pick it up in a manual.

  But there is one kind of writer you can learn to be and you will not need FACTS, TALENT, or IMAGINATION. You can become a newsmagazine cover story writer. Just master the six rules enumerated below and you will know all you need to about how to write a newsmagazine cover story—or at least the kind of newsmagazine cover story dealing with lifestyle, soft news, and cultural figures.

  RULE ONE

  Find a subject too much has already been written about.

  To do this, read with care the following: Women’s Wear Daily, Vogue, Joyce Haber’s column, Suzy’s column, the “Arts and Leisure” section of the Sunday New York Times, Rolling Stone, and the movie grosses in Variety.

  Any name mentioned more than four or five hundred times in the last year is a suitable subject for a newsmagazine cover.

  RULE TWO

  Exaggerate the significance of the cover subject.

  Study the following examples to see how this is done by the experts:

  “Today, a few weeks shy of twenty-six, Liza has evolved in her own right into a new Miss Show Biz, a dazzlingly assured and completely rounded performer. The Justice Department should investigate her. She is a mini-conglomerate, an entertainment monopoly” (Time on Liza Minnelli, February 28, 1972).

  “At thirty-five, Coppola stands alone as a multiple movie talent: a director who can make the blockbuster success and the brilliant, ‘personal’ film” (Newsweek on Francis Ford Coppola, November 25, 1974).

  “Finally, the film confirms that Robert Altman, the director of Nashville, is doing more original, serious—yet entertaining—work than anyone else in American movies” (Newsweek on Nashville and Robert Altman, June 30, 1975).

  “At twenty-nine, salty Lauren Hutton is America’s most celebrated model of the moment—and the highest-paid in history, as well…. Her extraordinarily expressive face and throwaway sex appeal, captured in the strong, spirited photographs of Richard Avedon, have made Hutton a permanent fixture in the pages of Vogue and at least a passing fancy in five movies. And in contrast to the exotic stone-faced beauties of the 1960s, her natural gap-toothed, all-American good looks epitomize the thoroughly capable, canny, contemporary woman of the Seventies” (Newsweek on Lauren Hutton, August 26, 1974).

  “Margaux is the American Sex Dream incarnate, a prairie Valkyrie, six feet tall and one hundred thirty-eight pounds…. Effortlessly, Margaux stands out in a gallery of fresh young faces, newcomers who are making their names in modeling, movies, ballet, and in the exacting art of simply living well. They add up to an exhilarating crop of new beauties who light up the landscape in the U.S. and abroad” (Time on Margaux Hemingway and the New Beauties, June 16, 1975).

  RULE THREE

  Find people who know the subject personally and whose careers are bound up with the subject’s. Get these people to comment on the subject’s significance.

  “Add to all this her beliefs in the trendy cults of mysticism and metaphysics and she becomes thoroughly modern Marisa, aptly crowned by the International Herald Tribune’s society chronicler Hebe Dorsey as ‘the girl who has everything plus’ ” (Newsweek on Marisa Berenson, August 27, 1973).

  “ ‘This event is the biggest thing of its kind in the history of show business,’ modestly declared David Geffen, the thirty-year-old human dynamo, ‘Record Executive of the Year,’ chairman of the board of Elektra/Asylum Records, who just pulled off one of the great coups in the music business—signing Dylan away from Columbia Records” (Newsweek on Bob Dylan’s concert tour, January 14, 1974).

  “This is Roy Halston Frowick … known simply as Halston—the premier fashion designer of all America…. Halston’s creative strength derives from personally dressing the most famous and fashionable women in the world, and while his name is not yet a household word, his impact on fashion trend setters is considerable. ‘Halston is the hottest American designer of the moment,’ says James Brady, the former publisher of Women’s Wear Daily and now publisher of Harper’s Bazaar. Fashion consultant Eleanor La
mbert goes even further. ‘Along with Yves St. Laurent,’ says Miss Lambert, ‘Halston is the most influential designer—not only in America, but in the world’ ” (Newsweek on Halston, August 21, 1972).

  RULE FOUR

  Try, insofar as it is possible, to imitate the style of press releases.

  “On the one hand she is very American, with deep roots in the South and an almost apple-pie adolescence (from cheerleader to campus queen). There is about her a touching innocence, openness, expansiveness, and vulnerability. But at the same time she is no bright-eyed square. She breathes sophistication, elegance, grace, passion, experience. Dunaway has become more than a star—she is a style and a symbol” (Newsweek on Faye Dunaway, March 4, 1968).

  “She is the rural neophyte waiting in a subway, a free spirit drinking Greek wine in the moonlight, an organic Earth Mother dispensing fresh bread and herb tea, and the reticent feminist who by trial and error has charted the male as well as the female ego” (Time on Joni Mitchell, December 16, 1974).

  “There are many things gorgeous about Robert Redford. The shell, to begin with, is resplendent. The head is classically shaped, the features chiseled to an all-American handsomeness just rugged enough to avoid prettiness, the complexion weather-burnished to a reddish-gold, the body athletically muscled, the aura best described by one female fan who says: ‘He gives you the feeling that even his sweat would smell good’ ” (Newsweek on Robert Redford, February 4, 1974).